For this next installment in this long-running interview series, contributing editor Peter Mishler corresponded with Michael Leong. Leong is a poet, critic, editor, and educator. His most recent books of poetry are (Fence Digital, 2017) and (Black Square Editions, 2018).
He is also the author of the monograph (University of Iowa Press, 2020) and the co-translator, with Ignacio Infante, of Vicente Huidobro’s Sky-Quake: Tremor of Heaven (co•im•press, 2020). A Co-Editor of , he is Robert P. Hubbard Assistant Professor of Poetry at Kenyon College.
: What is the strangest thing you know to be true about the art of poetry? : This is such an interesting question to me, Peter, because I often think of poetry as something that is beyond the true and the false; so my initial response is that poetry’s strangeness is so tied up with how it productively messes with what we previously thought were stable truths and stable falsehoods. To get at your question more directly—I continue to be amazed by the untimeliness of poetry: the way that it comes to us at the oddest and most inconvenient moments. We’re often moved to write poetry when it’s not particularly suitable, which is most of the time (when we’re working our day jobs, when we’re driving, when we’re in bed having forgotten to put a pen and paper on the nightstand).
Poetry acts like a wrench in business-as-usual, and we can either embrace it or tune it out, doing either at our own peril. Poetry has an enormous synt.
